Poetry

In Dr. Seema Yasmin’s If God Is A Virus, problems of medicine become problems of language, of (in)access and perception thereof. Here is a voice unafraid to confront the lingering effects of colonialism on the anti-Black, misogynist, islamophobic medical industry, even when Yasmin’s speakers interrogate their own positionality therein. From this anti-imperial politic spawns a vast and complex formal consciousness: cento and ghazal meet diagnostic chart and phylogenetic tree. Here is a poetics that builds new possibilities within ruptures and alienations of language; a testament to poetry’s ability to dissect catastrophe at the root in a way science could never imagine. In an age ravaged by the turmoil of disease, in the shadow of western national failures, here is a poetics that pushes beyond witness - a poetics of resistance, of life despite.

In this breathtaking and urgent collection, Dr. Seema Yasmin lets you glimpse places you shouldn't see and makes you question why you think you shouldn't. She breaks medical rules, solders them into new sculptures, and examines the byproduct--which looks a little like humanity. In her hands, a sole headline in Scientific American becomes a poem, as does the hippocratic oath, the Broca's region. She searches under assumptions to show us contradictions; she lets us travel to Liberia, to the frontlines of an epidemic, to the backrooms of the doctor's office. Every journalist should read this book, every doctor, every patient. I learned from her secrets, I emerged with new eyes. Gird your heart, though, she’s on a mission to break it with her tongue.

If God Is A Virus is an incisive and honest exploration of everything from family lore, stigma and sex, all seamlessly mixed with a critique of our global response to disease outbreaks like Ebola.

Your scheduled programming / Has been interrupted" by these here poems. Poems that reveal more—more humanity; more science; more intersectional thought; more truth, than journalism or science alone ever could—about how deeply and rampantly the colonial projects of medical racism and 'globalisation' go hand in hand and remain largely unchecked. Until now... Dr. Yasmin comes through stat! with the breakout that ought to be its own viral outbreak. You'll be able to turn the news off forever after this...

All my life/I was told women swallow sand/unless we are sounding/ a warning," Dr Seema Yasmin writes so evocatively, patiently, in her debut book of poetry, If God Is A Virus. While reading this book waves of feeling seen ruptured through me multiple times. Yasmin plucks words so precisely that their mere utterance causes a deep, deep recognition. She is also embodying the Golden Age of Islam, where poets were physicians and physicians were poets, using the divine to understand mankind and its art-making, challenging what lies within the psyche, as well as the heart. This book is a revelation, I am grateful for both its lucidity and profundity.

If God is a virus, what then? Seema Yasmin’s fantastic hybrid poetry collection overthrows the dry mindlessness of scientific halls, their power points and false Gods in the face of racism and global domination. Unapologetic, and through her Muslim heart, she fiercely, lyrically, and iconoclastically examines the recitation of compassion. Here, the narrative discourse of collective tragedy places us in Liberia, during an Ebola outbreak, with Muslim and non-Muslim bodies, and the complicit deficiencies of the “humanitarian.” Here, we are brown and Black in the clinics of “public health” in the “developed” world. God is a virus, and she teaches us to see through data while teaching us to love.

This timely collection traces the vectors of disease, medicine, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. Throughout, Yasmin courageously reports what journalists aren’t allowed to print and tries to heal what other doctors aren’t trained to diagnose. These poems should be prescribed reading (especially in the medical humanities) because they critically revise the Hippocratic oath into a more just covenant and re-define the “clinical” into a more caring practice. If God is a virus, then poetry is her feverish symptom. Let this book spread virally. Let it infect all our imaginations.